under the sod, dead by his own hand, might be watching her unawares. It
was one of those moments when a bygone emotion is so vividly revived,
as if some long hidden landscape were revealed by a sudden lightning
flash. The years had brought her immunity from the poignancy of the
pain of old sorrows, but for one brief and bitter instant she cowed
with the old fear, she trembled with the old-time agony.

Then she smiled at the unreasonableness of her feeling, and dropping
her eyes, walked on with slightly quickened steps.

"It cannot be a woman's duty to go on living with a man who is dragging
her down, or even who prevents her from realizing her best; and yet,
there is the influence. That is a trick of my old Puritan training, of
course, but after all it is right to consider. One must count influence
as a factor if one believes in civilization, and I do believe in
civilization; certainly, I would not go back to barbarism. But is a
woman to be tied down--oh! how a woman is always tied down! Limitation
--limitation--limitation; that is the whole story of a woman's life;
and the harder she struggles to get away from her bonds the more she
proves to herself by the pain of the wrist cut by the fetters how
impossible it is to break them. Women contrive to deceive men sometimes
into believing that they have overcome the limitations of their sex;
and they even deceive themselves; but they never deceive each other. A
woman may believe that she herself has accomplished the impossible, but
she knows no one of her sisters has."

She smiled sadly and yet humorously, pausing a moment on the curbstone
before crossing the wet and icy street. Then as she went on and a
coachman pulled up his horses almost upon their haunches to let her
pass, she took up the thread of her reflections once more,--